Publisher's Synopsis
The Writer's Passage is a journey through time in which writers engage with all the vital stages in the history of world literature. In this course of thirty-five lessons, millennia of human experience is turned by way of the alchemy of story into fuel for new creative writing. The journey begins in the childhood of language - in nursery rhyme, fable and fairy tale and then turns to the powerful myths of creation. Myths bestow a powerful charge - simply to hear them can be salutary. To engage with them through creative writing intensifies the experience exponentially, bringing them fully alive with opportunities for creative growth.After that, the course travels through historic time, following the trade routes of culture from ancient India to the twenty-first century. Through depth encounters with the work of Sappho and Socrates, Shakespeare and Ginsberg, students enter the lives of the poets and join in their projects. The shift of perspective demanded by the exercises in this book is in itself deeply liberating. The scope of the soul is enlarged merely by trying on the soul-skin of a different time, culture and personality - to serenely reformulate the eightfold path of the Buddha or passionately hurl oneself into the battle fury of the Viking; to tangle with the verbal eroticism of Sappho or the righteous passion of the prophets. To become the pure Parzival of the medieval epics and then the devil in Goethe's Faust is an unmatched gymnastic for the creative soul.In this approach, rarely does the student of creative writing have difficulty producing work. On the contrary, many find that any existing blocks dissolve. To engage with this journey is an act of integration, an artistic initiation into the vitality of literature and the manifold ways of being human. In this way the work also serves as a course in personal development, undertaken through the medium of writing.
